In an analysis most people conduct in the dairy section of the grocery store, veteran litigators and a federal judge are trying to determine the value of eggs.

In an opinion issued June 1, just ahead of closing arguments in a month-long antitrust trial over alleged price-fixing among egg producers, U.S. District Judge Gene E.K. Pratter of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania wrote that before a jury could be presented with evidence regarding the value of eggs, the court had to go through the academic exercise of defining “value.”